Nissan Motor Announces Start of Production for All-New March

by SOHAIB: Nissan Motor (Thailand) Co., Ltd. NMT) today celebrated the start of production for the all-new Nissan March, a global compact vehicle. More than 200 guests and employees were at the kick-off event, which included representatives from the Thai government, including Trirong Suwanakiri, deputy prime minister.

Officially launching March 26 at the Bangkok International Motor Show 2010, the Nissan March will be the first model offered for sale under Thailand’s “eco-car” program, created to encourage the development of energy-efficient vehicles.

To receive eco-car designation, requirements for low fuel consumption and emissions must be met, as well as passenger safety standards for front and side impact under the stringent standards of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE regulation 94 and 95). The Thai eco-car program is an initiative of the Ministry of Industry’s Board of Investment, which was successful in establishing Thailand as a manufacturing hub for pickup trucks.

“With an increasing vehicle population in Thailand and valid concerns about higher pollution levels in cities across the country, we’re introducing a product that will have fewer CO2 emissions and less environmental impact,” said Toshiyuki Shiga, COO of Nissan Motor Co., Ltd. “Very importantly, too, producing and selling the eco-friendly Nissan March in Thailand, as well as exporting it to other countries in the Asian and Oceania markets, will create jobs and contribute to the country’s progressive auto industry development,” added Shiga, who attended the event.

The start of production for March positions NMT as a center for excellence in manufacturing, R&D and customer care. Thailand will join China, India and Mexico as one of Nissan’s global manufacturing hubs for Nissan March (known as the Micra in Europe and other countries), which ultimately will be offered in 160 world markets.

Nissan March is built on a new versatile platform, the V-platform, and is designed to have broad appeal to customers in both developed and emerging markets. The designers in Japan worked to create a vehicle that would convey agility and robustness in the design. On this, they delivered. As well, March is a reliable, stylish and eco-friendly car for people who enjoy everyday driving. The compact hatchback, with its affable appearance, also is engineered for easy handling and sprightly performance, while realizing class-leading fuel efficiency. The newly developed March powertrain features a 1.2-liter, 3-cylinder engine with an output of 79PS (108Nm) and 120g/km CO2 emissions (under UNECE regulation 101). March is available with a five-speed manual transmission or an all-new continuous variable transmission (CVT).

“The all-new March will simplify city life,” said Toru Hasegawa, NMT president. “March is a smart eco-car for people who enjoy their daily drives. New March drivers in Thailand will be pleased as well with the car’s modern and roomy interior and the many user-friendly technologies. It’s really the right car at the right time for this market.”

Dealers will accept customer bookings for Nissan March starting tomorrow, and vehicle delivery will start within a few weeks for the five-speed manual transmission version. Delivery of the March with CVT will begin in early June.

Priced from 375,000 baht to 537,000 baht, March will be sold through the NMT dealer network across Thailand.

As part of its mid-term business plan (named “Revolution 2012″) announced last October, NMT has targeted a more than 10 percent market share for Thailand. The company expects to achieve this mainly through the success of the eco-car project, launch of at least one new vehicle every year through 2012 and continuing quality improvements in the sales network. NMT FY2009 sales are expected to total 34,000 units, an increase of 22 percent versus FY2008. The company plans to sell 48,000 vehicles in FY2010, including 20,000 units of March.

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Esmond says, Toyota may extend discounts past March

by SOHAIB: Toyota Motor Corp. may keep aggressive discounts available for U.S. consumers beyond this month after unprecedented incentives lifted U.S. sales in early March.

Toyota's U.S. sales surged 40 percent in the first 10 days of March compared with the year-earlier period in the wake of a zero-percent financing offer and other incentives, Don Esmond, senior vice president of Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A., said in an interview.

Esmond said Toyota would evaluate March sales results and reaction from dealers and consumers before deciding whether to extend the discounts, which the company called its most "far-reaching sales program in history."

"We'll continue to keep the dealers competitive in the marketplace," Esmond said, speaking to Reuters by telephone after meeting with the company's dealers in Cleveland.

"I think we will have to take a look at results and reevaluate, but the promise I made to dealers was that we will continue to make them competitive," he said.

Esmond said Toyota expects to regain most of its U.S. market share lost in the past two months following a damaging series of recalls that have tarnished its reputation for quality.

Toyota's U.S. market share plunged to 13.4 percent in the first two months of this year, down from 17 percent for all of 2009.

Standing by

"Toyota owners have stood by us,” Esmond said. “They've got good confidence in the brand and the products."

"For us, it's a pretty big step up, but still if you look at what the competitors spend per vehicle basis, we are still 30 percent below our competitors," he said.

As recently as February, Toyota's incentive spending averaged $1,833 per vehicle, compared with $3,434 per vehicle on average for GM, according to industry tracking firm Edmunds.com.

Toyota, which has traditionally spurned steep discounts in order to protect resale values, is offering zero-percent financing for five years on top-selling models, including the Camry, and free maintenance for two years to win back U.S. consumers after a series of product safety problems.

Gregg Lemos-Stein, an auto analyst with Standard & Poor's, said such deep discounts would appeal to people who remain undecided about the brand and to whom the price was a major impediment to buying Toyotas, but it has the risk of cutting into profit margins as well as resale values longer term.

"The reason why it's key," Lamos-Stein said of residual values, "is that, traditionally, Toyota has had an advantage on leasing and financing its new vehicles based on strong resale values."

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British Gaming: Vancouver 2010

by SOHAIB: Massive sport events mean two things. One, the TV schedules are packed with coverage of events I know little or nothing about, and two, tie in video games. With the Winter Olympics coming up, Sega’s released their inevitable Vancouver 2010 game.

Vancouver 2010 boasts a whopping 14 different events in its main menu. This, quite simply, is a lie. There might be 14 different options, but there’s realistically about 3 different games. It’s the equivalent of those 500-in-one knockoff cartridges for the Gameboy where every 7th game is Pacman. Don’t be fooled by the name MAZE EATER.

One of the first things to be copied and pasted is skiing. Under the guise of Men’s Downhill, Men’s Super-G, Ladies Giant Slalom and Ladies Slalom, it’s a mildly interesting game of skiing down a slope through flagpoles. It’s mildly amusing but they’ve tried to make it more exciting by adding motion blur so extreme you’d think they just discovered the effects section of Photoshop for the first time. It’s also slightly curious how smashing in to the posts seems to have no effect on momentum which stands out a bit when the game is meant to be a realistic and serious take on the sports within.

Next off the photocopier is the trio of Bobsled, Luge and Skeleton. Featuring almost negligible differences between them, you’re using the analogue stick to move up and down the sides of the course without falling off. It’s not too bad to play as you’ve got to balance the high speed and getting a good score for the cornet with being on the sides to the risk of falling off and losing. It’s good fun, up to the point of the death corner in the Luge track. That just ain’t possible, son.

Not all the games are as successful, such as the Ladies Freestyle Aerials, an event that can only be described as a mess. This is thanks to a series of timing bars and crazy moving circles which you have to follow with the analogue sticks and keep aligned that just feel awkward.

I just can’t for the life of me figure out who the audience for this game is. People who like… the cold…? Olympics videogames are practically minigame collections, a genre which is best as a party game. Vancouver 2010 doesn’t seem to have been designed for this, something emphasised best through the achievements – where only one is for playing with other people, with the rest being made up of single player tasks. What sort of person would want to play this game solo? Besides, half the fun of multiplayer games is giving your characters rude names, which the game doesn’t allow. Don’t think you can just use a 1 instead of an I, you’ll need to be more creative than that.

Most of the games are played by taking turns, understandable considering the sports chosen, but that doesn’t make it as fun. Among the exceptions to this you have the snowboard and ski cross events, where they didn’t even bother to make different courses, which is much more lively and enjoyable as a 4 player experience.

Although it might look as though there’s been a lot of time spent working on the game due to the high level of visual polish (it’s quite a good looking game), but beyond that it pretty much feels dead. There’s a complete lack of atmosphere (to THE OLYMPICS) and there’s not much depth to the game to make you want to go back. Sure, make a serious winter sports package, but if you’re doing that then make it in depth, new courses to unlock, have skills to develop…

Vancouver really suffers from a lack of content. An already small amount of included sports is made up of mostly repetitive content, hardly pulling the range of sports you can find at the real games. You can try and hide it by sticking in ‘first person athlete view’ nonsense, but you’re not fooling anyone. The game is lifeless, empty, and contains no content that’ll really draw you back to it. The most fun you’ll have is trying to come up with creative ways of writing rude names. Say hello the newest representative from China, Qi r Buii.

Besides, it’s a sports collection that very rarely asks you to mash buttons. Forget the speed skating sliding nonsense – THAT is what these games are supposed to be about. At least we get next year off from Olympics tie-in rubbish…

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BGB talks MAG with Seth Luisi: quick-fixes and data-mining

by SOHAIB: The 256 player online game MAG shouldn’t be facing long waits for bug fixes to reach users as Sony has told British Gaming Blog about how they plan to speed up what usually is a length certification process.

Seth Luisi, director of development at Sony Computer Entertainment America said that the game has a “two tier patching system” that will allow for quicker updates to the game. As well as ones that have to go through Sony’s platform QA team as seen with most games, “the other we can test on our own and release a data patch which addresses things that aren’t really related to the executable. And a lot of the items too we can address too on the server, so we don’t even need to patch the client to make a lot of the changes and improvements to the game.”

Much of the game’s testing before release was through an open beta release. “We were always planning on having an extensive beta period. With a game that’s 256 players, we couldn’t even play it at Zipper. They have less than 150 people there at the whole company so we couldn’t even fill a single game so the beta was really key to get out there.”

As well as getting written feedback from the community, Zipper used the beta to collect a lot of details on how the game was being played though data mining: “You know, where people are running in the world, how easy it is for them to kill other people, lots of statistics on kill heat maps, movement heat maps, shot heat maps so tons of data that we can look at and adjust the level layouts, adjust the level tuning, and everything else.”

However, the more important question… is if it would be theoretically possible to get all 128 people on one team to one spot and defend that way.

“Absolutely, you can do that – you can do all 256. We’ve done it internally! The issue with that is that there’s always somebody who has to throw a grenade or shoot someone.”

“Getting everybody to stop firing long enough to get all of those people to one spot is much more challenging than you may think.”

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MAG 256 Launch Event

by SOHAIB: Sony’s new PS3 game MAG, which stands for Massive Action Game, is both the laziest title in the history of gaming and a pretty accurate description of what happens. It’s certainly a game, shooting does classify as action, and it is of a considerable scale. MAG’s hook is that you can play it online with up to a massive 256 players. To celebrate this, the launch event, MAG 256, saw 128 journalists and gamers convene in one room in London. It quite literally sounds like they were half-arsing it.

Developed by Zipper Interactive, best known for the military shooter series SOCOM, MAG is what happens when you think 8 v 8 games aren’t exciting enough. Set in a modern war with three private military corporations in a ‘shadow war’, it’s a first person shooter set on a massive scale.

To match the scale of the game, the event was set around a giant structure of the numbers 256, and also featured a wall displaying tweets with the hashtag #mag256 projected larger than reason would allow. Being highly mature, I began to fill this up with tweets about my journey to the event, my desire to CONTROL the screen, and random twaddle.

“I am looking down on you all. This is because I am better than you. Also, I am on a balcony.”

Stopping me from texting were the announcements from the ‘Voice of MAG’, a man whose parents either hated him or was given a name to set him on one career path, instructing us to return to our “battlestations”, to play 2 rounds of each of the 3 game modes.

I tend not to enjoy online shooters too much as I find they’re over-competitive. Many multiplayer modes have their own game elements and rules and so the only time you get to practice at them is when you go online: and with the level of responsibility you get in your small team combined with the verbal abuse you’ll receive over the headset if you’re not good, it’s very offputting to get the practice in you need to be any good, and so I just avoid the game.

But with MAG, and this might seem like odd praise, you’re allowed to be a bit crap. This isn’t to say the game is broken, it’s not, rather that you’re one of 128, relieving the pressure, and within that you’ve got a group that’s structured and you can be given orders. You can choose to maybe focus on sniping, or do the most healing (because no-one else seemed to), or try and take people out but you can still feel that you have a role within the team. You might not have the entire war resting on your shoulders but you can still make a difference by sticking around that control tower and defending it as people from the opposite team made attempts one by one to take it. It might not be the best strategies used by both sides, but it worked and was enjoyable.

The thing that MAG is really effective at is getting the feeling of being at war. I mean that in a good way, if such thing is possible. The scale of the battles is huge and with other players running around too you really get a good sense of it. Instead of being limited to a linear path, there are huge environments to explore and fight in… although sometimes it did feel repetitive in terms of running to get to a point, dying, respawning and repeat.

The PS3 copes with the demands of the game fairly well. Visually, the characters and environment all looked good. The animation… less so, but I’m not sure whether it was the fact 128 people were on the same internet connection to the states or that the game is more jerky than beef jerky. Characters would sometimes judder around slightly making it hard to know whether your shot hit them (just wait a few frames and you’ll find out), but vehicles were the worst. The tanks would just make huge jumps around the map looking so awkward and stuttering so much that even the worst stop motion animator would tell you that you need to make that smoother.

For a game that could be a complete mess due to the sheer size of it, MAG is a great surprise. The levels feel of a great scale and if you manage to get a full game going it really does feel lively. The controls work (though having the healing gun and grenades one button press away from each other is highly dangerous) and the respawns didn’t feel too long away.

It wasn’t the most ideal situation to play the game, giving everyone headsets while standing so close with such loud TVs meant that it was easier not to talk to anyone and guess where your platoon leader goes. Despite that though, I’m really impressed with MAG. It pulls off a difficult concept really well, though how well that transfers to the real world playing of the game is another matter – hopefully Zipper will release new content and encourage people to keep playing it so you get the full experience of it.

Oh, also, MAG. Seriously, they couldn’t come up with another name? MAG? It sounds like something you might hear shouted while someone smashes the table. Sony clearly have high expectations of the target audience.

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Ricoh Adds Options to GXR System

by SOHAIB: At the current CP+ tradeshow, Ricoh is displaying two additional lens blocks that it recently announced for its innovative GXR camera system, pictured here.

Rather than using interchangeable lenses for its GXR cameras, Ricoh uses interchangable lens blocks, as explained in the link above. Essentially, the lens blocks include a lens and an image sensor, giving the camera the ability to create varying levels of telephoto shots without requiring long lenses.

The P10 lens block includes a 28mm-300mm equivalent, while the A12 lens block has a fixed 28mm lens. The new lens blocks will appear in Japan in the second half of 2010, and they'll then migrate to other parts of the world a few months later.

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New Sony Cyber-Shot W370 Available Soon

by SOHAIB: The Cyber-shot DSC-W370 from Sony may very well represent the company's most powerful beginner-level point and shoot digital camera it has ever offered. With an MSRP of $229.99, that's no small feat. (Compare Prices)

The W370 can shoot at resolutions up to 14 megapixels, and it includes an impressive 7X optical zoom lens. It can shoot in 720p HD video, and the W370 has a 3.0-inch LCD.

In addition, the W370 offers Sony's "Sweep Panorama" technology, which allows the W370 to easily shoot panoramic photos at 243 degrees and at resolutions up to 7152x1080 pixels.

The W370 will be available sometime in March in four different body colors: Graphite black, green, silver, and red. This model definitely has a lot of interesting features, and I'm looking forward to having a chance to test it.

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